David Henkin

David Henkin, Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, is currently producing a history of weekly rhythms in the United States. He is the author of City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (1998), The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (2006), and, with Rebecca McLennan, Becoming America: A History for the 21st Century (2014).

Two spectacularly haunting new works of fiction share a frightening and resonant premise: a world in which sleep is disappearing. Insomnia has a storied history, of course, as both ailment and plot ...